Exhibition Opening: Fruits of Labor

Join Reverb Art + Design for Fruits of Labor, part of FotoFocus Biennial 2018: Open Archive. Artist Emily Hanako Momohara investigates themes of immigration, identity, and labor within the framework of her own family narrative. Her great-grandparents left a famine entrenched Okinawa, Japan for Hawaii, USA. In Hawaii her great-grandparents worked on a plantation where they groomed and harvested pineapple fields. They toiled through the day, sometimes with a child wrapped to their backs, and eventually were able to build their own, small, three-room house. It was within the confines of those three rooms where the family of 11 lived, grew, struggled and thrived.

Pineapples from the Hawaiian Islands were shipped to the mainland U.S. as luxury items. This exotic fruit is symbolic for the complex path her family has taken from immigrant labor to the consumers of luxury goods. Using imagery of agriculture and migration to unpack her personal and family story, Momohara allows us to critically reflect on the diverse experience of immigrants in America.